The development of complex military equipment traditionally has been based on a rigid, top-down approach, originating with a publication of a customer operational requirements document. The prime contractor decomposes the operational requirements document to allocate requirements at the weapon system level, which in turn are further decomposed and allocated at the subsystem and component level. This top-down, hierarchical approach ensures that customer requirements are reflected in lower-level requirements and become integral to the objective weapon system design. This approach, however, does very little to optimally allocate limited resources across a weapon system design, and objective characteristics of an operational design often exceed program constraints. In addition to suboptimized designs, the top-down approach often leads to misallocated development resources and development processes that are incapable of rapidly responding to inevitable changes in operational, fiscal, and technological considerations.
Customer recognition of the above-described dilemmas, the realities of tight fiscal budgets, and changes in the geopolitical climate during the past decade have had a noticeable philosophical effect on how future weapon systems can be developed and procured. The development of future weapon systems will be cost constrained so that a weapon system's capabilities will be partially determined by a customer's ability to procure funding. In addition, most forces are no longer forward deployed, but instead are forward deployable. The ability to project force around the world, and the ability to sustain a force outside a customer's sovereign territory, has placed a tremendous burden on the logistical operations of customers. For example, providing fuel for equipment to an extended force is by far one of the greatest logistical challenges. Another is carrying or transporting this equipment for use by the extended force. These demands can be cut significantly by reducing the weight of the equipment either by using lighter or smaller equipment. In essence, the importance of weapon system weight has been elevated to the same level as weapon system cost. Total weapon system cost and weight have become limiting resources to the development of future military weapon systems.
In response to these fiscal and geopolitical changes, some customers have established a mission need and a partial list of non-negotiable, operational requirements for future weapon systems. These customers also have requested prospective weapon system developers to design, develop, and demonstrate credible simulated modeling approaches to satisfying operational weapon system requirements and to developing weapon system designs that allocate constrained resources and optimize performance according to specified measures of effectiveness.
Previous efforts to develop software for weapon systems have focused on stand alone simulation software or software that provides analysis at the subsystem or component level only, because methods such as the above-described top-down approach were used to manage the overall design and development process. For example, R. Carnes et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,926,362, Airbase Sortie Generation Analysis Model (ABSGAM), describes a computer simulation model for analyzing the sortie generation capabilities and support requirements of air vehicle designs and for performing effectiveness analyses on these designs. The model cannot be used to allocate resources across a system or various subsystems or components of a design nor used concurrently and interactively with design work. Another similar invention is described by R. Adams, U.S. Pat. No. 5,415,548, System and Method for Simulating Targets for Testing Missiles and Other Target Driven Devices.
It would be advantageous to have an evaluation and simulation system that functions integrally and interactively with the conceptualization, design, and development of weapon systems, and particularly ground combat vehicles, under conditions whereby design concepts can be analyzed, constrained resources can be allocated across a weapon system architecture in a manner that optimizes the weapon system's combat effectiveness, and a virtual representation of the weapon system can be tested under simulated combat conditions for combat effectiveness. Moreover, it would be advantageous if a user of such an evaluation and simulation system could establish performance levels for operational, system, subsystem, and component requirements, while optimizing the ground combat vehicle's combat effectiveness and satisfying the resource constraints.